Interesting stuff from around the web 2008-11-02

Nabaztag, a screenless, WiFi-enabled bunny, born again with voice-recognition and RFID-awareness in 2007. Interfacing the node between virtual data and the sensory world, Nabaztag fetches information from the Internet, flashes lights on its nose and tummy, rotates its ears, sniffs RFID chips, speaks 36 languages and understands five.

The Internet of things

Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time [CNN.com]
It’s called “The Internet of Things” — at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings (like the Nabaztag above), as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected. [via plasticbagUK]

Some recent developments with the the BBC’s new artist pages [bbc.co.uk/music/artists]

Automatically linking artists and news on the BBC Music Beta [BBC – Radio Labs]
On many of the news stories published on BBC News journalists add related internet links. If a story covers a music artist, it might link out to their home page, their MySpace site or even a Wikipedia article. In MusicBrainz, each artist can have several URLs associated to them. By simply cross-referencing each link on a news story with the URLs in MusicBrainz, when we find a match we can confidently say that the news story relates to the artist associated with that URL.

Oh dear…

Greedy BBC Blocks External Links [blogstorm.co.uk]
“In an outrageous act of selfishness and greed the BBC has decided to stop giving real links to the websites featured in the “Related Internet Links” section on the right hand side of each news story.”

Martin Belam suggests an alternative :

“The recent that re-direct is there is entirely about measuring traffic in order to produce charts to show to the top management, and nothing about the wider web eco-system. You are what you measure – the BBC Trust isn’t interested in the BBC passing on PageRank, just in passing on traffic.”

Never start a pitch by talking about yourself, your team, your product, or your total addressable market. Instead, start by naming the thing that’s getting in the way of your customer’s happiness. Do that by painting an emotionally resonant picture of how the world currently sucks for your customer, who/what is to blame, and why.

I design and manage digital products. I write and talk about linked data, the open web and product design. I work for Nature Publishing Group. I was responsible for: ensuring every band the BBC plays can have a page, every programme it broadcasts has a site and, for the BBC's nature site. And once upon a time I failed to get my PhD in freshwater macro invertebrate ecology.